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Personal Businesses On the Rise
 Number of US businesses with no employees (Intuit/IFTF study) (click to enlarge) |
Paul Kedrosky pointed out an Intuit/IFTF study on small business (PDF) that talks about the rise of the personal business. Tim O’Reilly has a nice riff on this as well.
As I talk to people, I find more and more who consider themselves free agents and, even though they have an employer, take pains to keep themselves free of organizational entanglements. They use their own email address for most correspondence, buy their own tools, and see their employment more like a business to business relationship than a traditional employer-employee relationship.
Thomas Malone, who’s been on IT Conversations several times talks about this in his book The Future of Work. It’s work reading, but if you don’t have the time at least listen to the talk
Posted by windley on February 1, 2007 10:46 AM
Comment from Parag Shah at February 16, 2007 12:14 AM
Hello Phil,
Nice post. Many people are now opting to run their own one person businesses. New media, especially blogs and podcasts along with payment collection services have helped in making this possible.
I run a one person company and have been doing so for 6 years. One of my biggest problems was scaling up. Since I bill hourly, the only way to scale up is either to work more hours or increase the billing rate. Since I am into training I woud like to follow a strict philosophy of dedicating a certain percentage (60%) of my time to learning, practicing, and writing, leaving me with 40% of my time for billable work. With blogs and podcasts I am actually hoping to generate some revenue from the time I spend writing and producing content. I plan to start a screencast that explains programming best practices.
This is something anyone with expertise can do, and start generating an alternate revenue stream. It might be atrickle initially, but I am sure if they create good useful content, it will generate a good amount of revenue in time to come. Sometime back I also read that YOUTube is planning to pay contributers. This can also be a good way to generate revenue from short tutorial videos. The users can view them for free and the creator also generates some revenue.
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